I may have shown it to you sometime in the past, but now that’s its moving away, this will be the last time. It’s one of a couple of art cars that have congregated for years on a certain block in the Whiteaker, but no more.

It was fun watching it evolve over the years, growing ever-more scales, and then its fins and tail. Too bad it couldn’t have been sent up the Willamette River to Portland on a barge instead of like this.

A couple of decades ago Satch Carlson wrote an editorial in Autoweek that was about the “fish car”. He defined fish car as the car that when you go fishing and catch fish, you just put them on the floorboard in the back making no effort to protect the car. You keep the fish car around for dirty business. In my family the oldest rustiest car is always called the fish car. Its one of those lingo things that stuck, like the “map gland”, another Carlson invention.

Built two art cars with my students back around 94-95. The art car parade in Houston is a pretty big deal and you need to work hard to imagine the car that is actually under the float in many cases. Takes a lot of imagination and this car is an art car but it’s not very high on the food chain.